The Dickensian Tragedy of Britain’s Growing Poverty

Hot buttered rum—and homelessness—this holiday season

December 24, 2018

One
hundred and seventy-five years after it was published, Charles Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol is still drawing audiences. This year, its nearly sold-out adaptation
at The Old Vic theatre in London has a post-show collection for The Felix Project, an organization that collects
surplus food and redistributes it to charities—a classic pairing for a work
which, like many of Dickens’s works, gave the modern world some of its most
poignant descriptions of poverty in Victorian Britain.

Nostalgia
for this era is particularly strong at Christmas time, with many beloved modern traditions
such as family ice skating, mince pies, and hot buttered rum rooted in
nineteenth-century Britain. But in 2018, Dickens’s work resonates in more
unsettling ways, as well.

Last month, the United Nations
released a report
containing a withering review of poverty in Britain, “the world’s fifth largest
economy,” as UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston noted. Citing the “immense
growth in food banks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping
rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness,” Alston declared that “for
almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is
not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster all rolled
into one.”

The report rippled through the
Westminster community, which finds itself in the midst of a fierce debate about
the nature of “British” values as the U.K. attempts to extract itself from the
European Union. The Conservative Party, which in recent years has pushed drastic
cuts to welfare such as housing benefits, rejected the rapporteur’s findings,
with Work & Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd describing its tone as “highly
inappropriate.” On the opposing side, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted: “The
scale of poverty in Britain shames this Tory Government.”

Tensions
were further inflamed as Conservative politicians were photographed smiling at
food banks, a “photo opportunity” Corbyn quickly denounced during the weekly
Prime Minister’s Questions. The Trussell
Trust, a charitable organization of over 420 food banks across the UK, has
warned of unprecedented projected levels of usage leading up to Christmas.

One of the
culprits behind this increase, the UN report and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn argue,
is Universal Credit, a reform spearheaded by the Conservative Party that was meant
to simplify the welfare system by streamlining multiple benefits into one
monthly payment. Announced in 2010 at the Conservative Party Conference, UC, as
it is informally known, began to be introduced in 2013 and was supposed to be
rolled out across the U.K. by 2017. It has yet to be fully implemented and has
been plagued by IT failures and accusations of management problems. In a
letter to the Guardian in
October, heads of multiple poverty and homeless organizations wrote that “one
in five claims to universal credit currently fail because claimants find the
process too complex,” leaving impoverished households “without essential
support.” The combined payment also takes five weeks between people
successfully filing a claim and when they actually receive benefits, with some reports
of delays as long as twelve weeks. Labour member of Parliament Frank Field said
in October that the delay had driven some of his female constituents to sex
work.

Food banks have
reported a fourfold increase in visitors, and a 52 percent increase in the
number of three-day emergency food packages distributed, in areas where
Universal Credit has been in place for 12 months or more, the Trussell Trust reported in April. Again,
the wait time is the suspected culprit. “That is an awfully long time to wait, during which time many
clients have been thrown into crisis, unable to afford a food shop and forced
to come to the food bank,” Alice Clifford, who volunteers at a London food bank,
told me. The UN rapporteur similarly blamed
the delay, writing that it “pushes many who may already be in
crisis into debt, rent arrears, and serious hardship, requiring them to
sacrifice food or heat.”

Homelessness, meanwhile, is on a
disturbing rise. Statistics released this month reveal that there are currently
more than 120,000 children in temporary homes including bed and breakfast rooms
and hostels—a twelve-year high. The charity Shelter
put
the number of homeless in Britain at 320,000 this year—an increase of 4 percent
from the previous year. Official figures suggest that between 2010 and 2017 there
was a 169 percent rise in homelessness.

The decisions forced by such rising
numbers can be devastating. “Because resources are so scarce it turns council
workers into ‘guardians’ of a very limited ‘pot of gold,’” Edward, a London
social worker, told me. “So instead of being agents who are there to help
people, they become people who have to guard against people who don’t deserve
it enough: It’s soul destroying.” He compared it to the Victorian notion of the
“deserving” and “undeserving” poor, portrayed in Dickens’s novels through
characters such as Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol—decent and hard working,
as compared to Bill Sikes, the villain in Oliver
Twist. “You find yourself, without even realizing it, considering who deserves
your help the most,” Edward said.

The forces behind poverty are, admittedly,
complicated. “We kind of boil it down to three drivers: one is people getting
stuck in low pay, one is housing costs rising and one is [the reduction in]
disposable income,” Chris Goulden, deputy director at the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, a poverty research organization, told me.

Fifty-eight percent of impoverished Londoners
are employed, but dealing with unaffordable rents, according to Manny
Hothi, director of policy for Trust for
London. Employers aren’t required to pay the “London Living Wage,” currently
estimated to be £10.55 per hour, compared to the National Living Wage of £7.83
per hour.

Dickens paid severalvisits
to areas of deep poverty in 1843, in the months before he wrote A Christmas
Carol. “It’s scary seeing the number of homeless people right now,” Jane Young,
an audience member at the Old Vic’s production this month told me. “It’s scary
to think that society hasn’t changed enough to make this story irrelevant.”